Two Houses: One Across the Field, One on a Hill

25Sep10

I’ve recently completed two acrylics that have a house as the subject. The first was a response to a call to artists on the subject of “The cutting edge”. I ended up interpreting it as what is modern, versus something more literal like a knife, or the aspect of cutting something. I thought about the idea for a long time and decided that I wanted to comment on the fact that people experience so much of reality through the internet and via a browser window.

I have been wanting to include a desert landscape into something for a long time, so I explored it with this one. I grew up in Nevada and I miss the beautiful desert scenes.

Here is a mid-stage version of the painting:

I’m really happy with the color palette that I used.  It is very light and has a lot of pastel tones which is unusual for me.  I used collage to make the browser aspects that frame the landscape (printed some screenshots and then pasted them on the canvas and painted over some elements of the paper).

“The House Across the Field” 18×24, Acrylic on Canvas, 2010

Here is a detail where you can see how the browser parts turned out:

Here is a detail of the little house. The scene reminds me of a field that I used to live across from, which is why I titled it “The House Across the Field”

The second piece, that I just finished today, is meant to be a bit spooky for Halloween. I was trying to speak a little to Norman Bates from Psycho when I titled it “He lives on the Hill” (my favorite movie, BTW). I was also inspired by Edward Hopper’s house paintings.

Here is a mid-stage version:

It is a night scene, and the quality of light was really beautiful. The black background with lots of blue is a color palette that I’ve been using a lot lately and one which I’ve found pretty successful.

I’ve used a bit of dripping technique to create that spooky tone, but I had to scale it back to that it was just a subtle effect in a couple of spots (you can see some drips in the lower left). I thought the tree limb invading into the space from the upper left was eerie and broke the composition up nicely.

“He Lives on the Hill” 18×24, Acrylic on Canvas,  2010

Here is a detail:

I didn’t purposely start painting houses for any reason in particular, and I’m not sure if I will keep it up. The angles are definitely different from the more organic shapes that I usually paint. We will see where inspiration leads me.

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